Foreword
To avoid confusion, we, the writers of the foreword, wish to clarify one thing up front: the title of this book, How to Play Video Games, is a joke.
We know because the format of this book is modeled on our own book, How to Watch Television. The title of that book was the same kind of joke. That is, our book didn’t teach people how to watch television (who needs a book for that?), and these essays do not teach you how to play video games. Look elsewhere for walkthroughs, cheats, and speedruns.
Instead, How to Play Video Games features 40 essays, each focusing on a particular video game and modeling a critical approach to understanding video games as popular culture. The premise behind both of these books is to assemble essays written by very smart people with very smart things to say about popular culture, such as television and video games. Most of these authors are academics, who typically publish their work as 25-plus-page essays in journals or 200-plus-page monographs, often with hundreds of citations, detailed sections on methodology, and commentary on insider debates within the field. Although that may be all well and good for academics to share their insights with one another, who else wants to read that? We believe that the vast majority of people who watch television or play video games, whether they are students in a course or inquisitive everyday readers, have something to learn about popular culture from us media scholars if only we presented our ideas in a style designed to be more broadly read and understood. That’s what these books are for.
This book is not a collection of instructions; video games stopped coming with detailed user manuals years ago, embedding their directions within tutorial levels and progressive design. It is also not a collection of reviews because these writers are not primarily reviewers. They don’t write about video games to assign a number of stars—or whatever it is video game reviewers assign to video games so that you can decide whether to go out and buy them. They instead write to offer insight on how video games work as a distinctive medium, how people do things with them, how they are meaningful to individuals and society at large, and why they matter beyond “just fun.”
Those are the kinds of issues about media culture that academics are interested in, and this book presents them in an accessible format by focusing on a particular game, and a particular approach, and by writing in a language that doesn’t assume everyone reading it already has a PhD. Although the people who wrote these essays are not reviewers, they are also not just researchers. One of the key reasons they have been selected for this book is because they write well. The format of this book allows for a kind of middle ground between the academic journal article and the video game review—an area that is fertile terrain for those who study popular culture to loosen their style and share their insights more popularly.
Back to that “joke” of the book title. Truth be known, it is only “sort of” a joke.
Although these essays don’t explicitly give you instructions for how to play video games, they do provide different ways to think about how video games work as culture and what you might be doing when you play them. Thus, by changing how you think about video games and what you notice while you’re leveling up, it might just change how you play them. Have fun!